If you think your city streets are getting rougher,
here is some data that might show you it is not just your imagination. Click
here to learn more about TRIP, the group behind the study.
Approximately one in four miles of the nation's major roads -- interstates, freeways and local roads -- are in substandard condition. A Washington, D.C.-based transportation research group claims those rough roads cost the average metro area motorist $400 a year in additional vehicle operating costs.
TRIP, the Transportation Research Information Program, says:
"Rough Ride Ahead: Metro Areas with the Roughest Rides and Strategies to Make Our Roads Smoother," found that the metro areas (500,000 people or more, including city and suburbs) with the highest percentage of major roads and highways with unacceptable pavement quality are:
Kansas City -- 71%
San Jose -- 67%
St. Louis -- 66%
Los Angeles -- 64%
San Francisco-Oakland -- 60%
San Diego -- 58%
New Orleans -- 55%
Boston -- 49%
Sacramento -- 49%
Oklahoma City -- 47%
The group provides data to help you get local on this story.
- This is a list of big city roads. Appendix A: Metro areas of 500K and greater -- Percentage (May 2005)
- This is a list of medium-sized city roads. Appendix C: Urban areas of 250K to 500K -- Percentage (May 2005)
- This is a list of large cities showing what TRIP says are the additional vehicle maintenance costs caused by rough roads. Appendix B: 2003 VOC -- Urban areas, 500K and greater (May 2005)
- This is a list of medium sized cities showing what TRIP says are additional vehicle maintenance costs caused by rough roads. Appendix D: 2003 VOC -- Urban areas, 250K to 500K (May 2005)
The report says that it is not all bad everywhere. Atlanta, Orlando and Phoenix have 75 percent of their roads listed in “"good condition" and 11 major metro areas have at least 50 percent of their major roads in "good condition."
Who is TRIP, the group behind the study? In part, it is funded by groups that would benefit financially from increased spending on road construction and maintenance. The group's Web site says:
Founded in 1971, TRIP ® of Washington, D.C. is a nonprofit organization that researches, evaluates and distributes economic and technical data on highway transportation issues. TRIP is sponsored by insurance companies; equipment manufacturers, distributors and suppliers; businesses involved in highway engineering, construction and finance; labor unions; and organizations concerned with an efficient and safe highway transportation network.
When Laptops Are a Pain
C/Net has an interesting story about how the full-time use of laptops could be tough on your bod.
"When you look at the design, laptops were never (meant) as a replacement for a desktop computer," said Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory at Cornell University. "The idea was portability for occasional use. It was never intended to be a machine you would work at for eight hours a day, 52 weeks a year."
...Statistical information on injuries related to notebook computer use is scarce, but doctors report a steady stream of new patients who've overdone it on the machines. That's not surprising given the boom in laptop sales. Nearly 49 million notebooks were sold in 2004 worldwide, almost double the number sold in 2000, according to market researcher IDC.
The devices account for more than a quarter of the computer market, and are set to surpass desktop sales in the United States by 2008, IDC said.
The main problem with laptops is that the screen and keyboard are so close together. Without the aid of peripherals, laptop users have two choices, neither of which would win them any points for posture. They can cramp their neck down to view the monitor or they can elevate the machine to eye level, which can wreak havoc on shoulders and arms.
And the wrists lose regardless, because the keyboard is so small, leading to awkward hand positioning.
"These are all recipes for disaster for your body, and your musculoskeletal system especially," said Nicholas DiNubile, an orthopedic surgeon in Havertown, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb.
Laptops can cause other physical woes. People have been burned by the heat the machines generate. The temperature issue can also cause fertility problems in men who place the machines on their laps for prolonged periods. Frequent travelers can put strain on backs, hands and shoulders by lugging a laptop around.
FCC Slaps Stations Over Closed Captioning
The Federal Communications Commission wants to hit three Washington, D.C. television stations with fines totaling $40,000 for not providing closed-captioned coverage during a May 25, 2004, thunderstorm and tornado watch. This is pretty serious stuff for broadcasters to be thinking about and it is the second time in a year that I am aware of that the FCC has taken action against stations for not providing information for the hearing impaired during big breaking news. Newsrooms around the country should be talking about this.
The FCC's action explains what broadcasters have to provide in situations such as threatening storms. The law does not require closed captioning, but it does require some sort of visual information about what is going on.
The FCC wrote:
Section 79.2(b)(1)(i) requires that video programming distributors providing emergency information in the audio portion of programming must provide persons with hearing disabilities with the same access to such information that distributors provide to listeners, either through a method of closed captioning or by using another method of visual presentation.
The Commission's rules do not require closed captioning, but allow for other methods of visual presentation, including, but not limited to, open captioning, crawls, or scrolls. The Commission stated that it was permitting these alternatives because it was concerned about the limited "real-time" captioning resources available and their current costs.
The Commission made clear, however, that regardless of the method of visual presentation used, video programming distributors must "use [a] method of visual presentation [that] ensure[s] the same accessibility [to emergency information] for persons with hearing disabilities as for any other viewer, as required by the rule." This could include already prepared signs or charts or handwritten information contained on a white board. The Commission mandated equal accessibility because emergency information is of "equal or greater importance to persons with hearing disabilities, and television plays a critical role in its dissemination." Further, it is clear from the Commission's definition of emergency information, i.e., information about a "current" emergency that provides critical details concerning "how to respond to the emergency," that the Commission required video programming distributors to display emergency information in a timely manner so that viewers can respond to a current emergency before becoming endangered. The Commission long ago recognized the importance of timeliness of providing emergency information, noting that "if visual notification is delayed, it should not be unreasonably delayed so that a hearing impaired person would not have time to take reasonable and constructive precautions with regard to the emergency."
Teen Suicides
The Seattle media have had the tough task of responsibly covering a succession of three teen suicides in that city this spring.
I was especially moved by the Editors's note on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's coverage. It said:
Editor's Note: This story, published in print editions of the Post-Intelligencer on Monday May 23, was not immediately posted online primarily because of the effect experts advised us it could have on suicidal teens. After seeing the story, suicide-prevention experts now believe it is responsible and constructive and deserves wider dissemination. For those reasons and after many requests from readers, we reconsidered and are posting Monday's story.
The story responsibly covers the issue while not sensationalizing the deaths. It points out:
Experts caution that teenage suicides are rarely attributable to a single cause like academic pressure or a romantic breakup. Nevertheless, in the murky world of After, everyone is grasping for reasons -- something to change, someone to blame.
"Suicide is like no other kind of death," said Sue Eastgard, director of the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, who has now made several trips to the Eastside to speak with worried parents.
"It begs the question, who do we blame? How do we make sense of it? That is what the parents of these kids are wrestling with every night as they fall asleep: 'Why? What did we do wrong? What did the school do wrong?' This is torture that goes on for years."
Teenage suicide has actually dropped over the past 10 years in the United States, though in 2003, about 70,500 13- to 18-year-olds were hospitalized for self-inflicted harm. In Washington, two people between the ages of 10 and 24 take their own lives each week -- most often with a gun, second-most by hanging.
Eastgard has been pushing to get suicide prevention training into schools, just as the state mandates HIV/AIDS awareness. But she has met with only middling success. Of 729 middle and high schools in Washington, 130 have included her education program in their curricula despite the fact that suicide kills far more young people here than AIDS.
Here are some Poynter Institute resources on the issue:
We have touched on the issue of suicide, especially teen suicide, many times here in Al’s Morning Meeting. Here are some examples of how to report the story well: 7/16/02, 7/30/02, 10/14/02, and 10/7/03.
And here are some other Poynter resources to help you report on this issue:
Covering Teen Suicide: One Paper's Decision :
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=79946Reporting on Suicide:
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=54176
Where do the Moviegoers Go?
Movie attendance has been on a rocket train downward for three straight years. Even with the release of the newest "Star Wars" movie, attendance is down year to year. But DVD sales and rental and TiVo are doing just fine. What issues rise out of this trend, including the health of big movieplexes that produce traffic for malls and retail centers? Around St. Pete there are lots of other businesses that draft off the movie traffic, including ice cream shops next to movie theatres. Does the cultural shift away from theatres change where couples go for dates?
The New York Times said:
Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, technologies like TiVo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home, as are advanced home entertainment centers, with their high-definition television images on large flat screens and multichannel sound systems.
"It is much more chilling if there is a cultural shift in people staying away from movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Exhibitor Relations Company, a box-office tracking firm. "Quality is a fixable problem."
But even if the quality of movies can be improved, Mr. Dergarabedian said, the fundamental problem is that "today's audience is a much tougher crowd to excite. They have so many entertainment options and they have gotten used to getting everything on demand."
Last year Americans spent an average of 78 hours watching videos and DVD's, a 53 percent increase since 2000, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's trade group. DVD sales and rentals soared 676.5 percent during the same period, and 60 percent of all homes with a television set now also have a DVD player. DVD sales and rentals alone were about $21 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.
Discs are now released just four months after a film's debut, and the barrage of advertising that accompanies the opening in movie theaters serves ultimately as a marketing campaign for the DVD, where the studios tend to make most of their profits.
By contrast, movie attendance has increased 8.1 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the association. Many in the movie industry point to that figure as a sign of overall health. But attendance was down in three of those five years, and the sharp increase in attendance in 2002 is attributed to the overwhelming success of "Spider-Man" and "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones."
More recently, the number of moviegoers has dropped, sliding 4 percent in 2003, 2 percent in 2004 and 8 percent so far in 2005.
Time spent on the Internet has soared 76.6 percent and video game playing has increased 20.3 percent, according to the association. Last year, consumers bought $6.2 billion worth of video game software, an increase of 8 percent from 2003, according to the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales.
Will sagging attendance force theatres to get real with the cost of popcorn? A couple of years ago CNN Money explored where theatres make their money. It turns out the concessions business is key to a theatre’s survival—so much so that some theatre owners joke that they are not in the movie business, they are in the candy business.
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Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts, and other materials from a variety of websites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed, and a link will be provided, whenever possible.
